by Meghan Sterling

My father talks to me in my sleep, his words reduced to syllables

split by his heavy tongue, like a red sea cleaving down the middle

 

at Moses’s feet, a perfect part, the line of scalp a shining light

between waves of hair. My father’s words like the dragging of a boot

 

in dirt, he does not say wish or need or love or why this and why me,

he mouths it in his gasps for air, he pantomimes, his arms grasping

 

the metal walker, his body behind moving metal as if caged. My father

doesn’t believe any new stories, like the one about my Grandmother

 

being stabbed on a rooftop. Instead he wags his striated tongue,

arching his eyebrows like a tv detective. What is happening to his body

 

isn’t true, either, he won’t believe that he can’t force his body, push his body

back to pliancy, back to the strength he had when he was kayaking

 

the coast of Alaska, glaciers at the stern, glaciers at the bow, the years

stretched out and yielding their ground like the Yukon, bright as the pink

 

fireweed singeing the tops of Denali. The water would part at the nose

of his boat as if he were traveling with God. My father only talks to me

 

when I’ve left, when he calls and I can’t get to the phone in time,

and the ringing cries out from across the sea of air its ragtime melody,

or when I run the bathtub for my daughter and the water parts

around a toy boat overturned beneath the faucet and I know

 

that my father will never arrive. My father doesn’t converse, he says

sssshhhhh with his filmy lips, he says lies with his bloated tongue.

 

He sits straight in his chair and greets us with his rigid shoulder bones

and I palm his bald skull, the closest we come to an embrace.